Tag: Death Toll

As reports appear of some Israelis gathering on hillsides to watch and cheer the military strikes on Gaza, Secretary of State John Kerry is said to have expressed frustration with the operation in comments intended only for an aide.

Potentially the most powerful typhoon on record, Haiyan swept across the Philippines on Friday and is heading for Vietnam, leaving a massive wake of death and destruction. But wait for the death toll—early reports rarely bear up.

A massive recovery and cleanup effort is under way on the East Coast as residents try to get their lives back to normal after the historic and devastating megastorm. Making things more difficult is the fact that nearly 6 million people in 15 states and Washington, D.C., remain without power.

After more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. death toll in Operation Enduring Freedom has reached 2,000. Marine Cpl. Taylor J. Baune, 21, from Andover, Minn., had married just three months before shipping out.

Other international emergencies have clearly occurred in the 10 days since the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, but the crisis hasn’t ended in one country just because the news cameras have roamed elsewhere in the meantime.

Strong aftershocks kept Japan on edge Saturday, a day after a devastating earthquake and tidal waves battered the country’s northeastern coast. Officials estimated the death toll at 1,700, but thousands more are missing.

On Wednesday, two days after an earthquake-triggered tsunami hit the shores of Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, local officials reported problems with an alert system that should have warned islanders of the incoming tidal wave.

Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the earthquake-rocked region of Qinghai in western China on Sunday as official estimates of the damage to human life rose to 1,700 dead, with 256 missing and 12,128 injured.

A group that monitors the death toll in Iraq believes the number of civilian deaths in 2009 to be less than half the number for 2008. Yet the United Kingdom-based group said that terrorist violence “still afflicts Iraq’s population more than any other.”

A U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan on Sunday raised the American death toll in 2009 to exactly twice the number of those soldiers killed there in that country in 2008. After eight years in Afghanistan, 940 U.S.—and 613 coalition—soldiers have died.

It may always be too soon to bring Sept. 11 disaster imagery into certain forms of media, especially advertising, but two different ad firms and their clients just learned the hard way that now is most definitely not the time for that sort of thing.

Perhaps it was to be expected after the mass exodus of American forces in late June, but August was a cruel month in terms of the Iraqi death toll caused by insurgent violence—the worst in 13 months. Unfortunately, the trend might continue as Iraqis navigate the aftermath of U.S. troop withdrawal and anticipate their national elections early next year.

With the death of a U.S. service member Friday, August now stands as the deadliest month ever for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Forty-five American troops have been killed so far this month, a disturbing sign that conditions in the nearly decade-long war are not getting any better.

The toll in the recent spate of clashes in the decades-long battle between Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government has been officially estimated: 40 civilians are being killed every day, with more than 100 wounded, as artillery shells and gun battles between the two sides devastate the Sri Lankan northeast.

As the current Israeli-Palestinian clash reached the three-day mark with no sign of resolution, President Bush weighed in on the crisis via a spokesperson at “the Western White House” in Crawford, Texas.

Cell-phone footage shot by a doctor in a makeshift morgue in Azizabad, Afghanistan, showing rows of dead Afghan civilians, including several children, has led to a renewed inquiry into an American-led airstrike that occurred on Aug. 22. American officials had previously insisted that only seven civilians had been killed in the attack, but they’re now having to face the possibility that the actual figure could be as high as 90.

As the official death toll climbs in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, the Burmese government remains recalcitrant while survivors and aid workers continue to be frustrated by the slow movement of supplies to the country’s worst-hit areas.

As more details of the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis in Burma emerge, it’s becoming clear that the storm is one of the worst disasters in years. The Burmese government is being criticized for responding inadequately and too slowly to the crisis, and President Bush, himself no stranger to this kind of criticism, is calling on Burma’s “military junta ... [to] allow our disaster assessment teams into the country” in order to help.

The Burmese government prepared for an influx of international aid Monday as the death toll from Saturday’s cyclone passed 10,000, according to Foreign Minister Nyan Win. That number suggested a far greater disaster than the 351 deaths reported earlier that same day.

April was the cruelest month in seven months in terms of the numbers of both civilians and U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq. A spate of deadly bombings on Wednesday killed four U.S. soldiers, bringing the monthlong total of American dead to 50, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s crackdown on Shiite followers of Moqtada al-Sadr made for more intense violence, particularly in Basra and Sadr City, which contributed to a reported 969 Iraqi civilian deaths.

The tragic task of tallying the number of Iraqis who have been killed in the war has been attempted by various parties with vastly different results, largely because of built-in logistical issues, and now the WHO’s health ministry has released its own figures while acknowledging the impossibility of precision.

Three car bombs ripped through the southern Iraqi province of Amarah on Wednesday, killing at least 46 and wounding 149, according to The Washington Post, which reported Thursday that the death toll was likely to climb.

NATO officials have registered Afghan President Hamad Karzai’s strong criticism of the Western coalition’s recent tactics, which have resulted in tragically high numbers of civilian deaths, and are offering conciliatory words in response.

Saturday was a particularly deadly day in and around Baghdad. Eight U.S. soldiers were killed by explosions or gunfire in different parts of the capital, raising the fatality count to 30 in the last six days, according to The Washington Post.

A group of U.S. troops were posted at a checkpoint on a bridge near Baghdad Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb from below, killing three American soldiers and wounding six others. The BBC reports that this latest attack brings the death toll of U.S. troops to at least 28 already this month.

Two more members of the news media have sacrificed their lives covering the Iraq war. Cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz and sound technician Saif Laith Yousuf, both Iraqi journalists working for ABC in Baghdad, were abducted Thursday and found dead at the city morgue Friday, according to an ABC executive.

British officials won’t publicly question the results of a study that put the estimated Iraqi death toll at 655,000—that’s more than 500 deaths per day—since the beginning of the war. The dispute over the study, published in The Lancet in October, centered on its methods and the large disparity between its estimates and Iraqi government figures.

At least 334 U.S. soldiers died from combat in Iraq from October to the end of January, the most of any four-month period to date. Battles in Baghdad have grown more frequent and roadside bombs have gotten more sophisticated and powerful, yet the president is as determined as ever to send more Americans into what Chuck Hagel called “that grinder.”